anthropomorphic and dissimilar

Roman Grabner, Vienna/Graz, 2011

A preoccupation with physical and mental spaces, their conditions and histories, and their way of relating to the individual plays a central role in Anne Schneider’s work. The husks, the layers that surround us, that are a protective shield serve her as a point of departure. She stacks wool blankets with circular imperfections, has wires dangle from the ceiling and the floor, architectural models made of wax hang in the room on threads, recalling body cavities, habitats that she keeps watch over, exploring their social structure. Her focus is always the individual and the surrounding architecture and space. Homing in on structural analogies, she creates a loosely knit fabric of formal affinities and related experiences.

In her most recent works Anne Schneider deliberately refers to the usual steel-reinforced concrete construction, sheathing iron rods in concrete, while at the same time giving the construction material the appearance of a soft textile and thus lending it an unusual familiarity. Thanks to the artist’s handling of this cold and hard material it takes on tactile qualities: human traces, folds, curvatures and scars. Based on this initial sheathing, she had developed works that continue in diverse ways this interplay of material and effect, construction and furnishing, architecture and individual, past and present.

The cushion, the pillow, the stool are sculptural forms that always relate to the individual regardless of the way they are made, their material and their origin. They represent the everyday man-object-relationship, symbolizing its corporeal limit along which the individual establishes contact with the outside world. Yet Anne Schneider is not concerned with actual body imprints in the form of hollows or protrusions in the concrete casts. These are the deposits of time, the traces of use, the collective associations, the inscriptions of the unconscious, the anthropological condensation in these functional objects, the memory of objects that capture her interest.

Some of Anne Schneider’s objects present familiar forms, yet they are (only) materializations of a void. Like Bruce Nauman who once made a cast of the empty space below his chair to make it visible and ‘tangible’, Anne Schneider also materializes what is seemingly invisible as symptoms. Each cast, each impression is testimony of a touch, while withholding us the contact with the object that lent its form. It is thus almost automatically grasped as separation, loss or absence. Each absence points to traces of a former presence and thus refers to the temporal dimension of the past and immediate present.

Like an archaeologist who is used to reading sediments and working through layers, the artist presents her works in a vertical dimension. There are metal rods emerging from the concrete casts reaching to the ceiling, formations resembling sacks that are folded along a pipe extending downwards. Metal poles connected with only a light-blue aluminium drawing lean against the wall. Strings and bands hang from the ceiling and stretch biomorphic objects to become longer. A door divides the space vertically and along with a metal ladder indicates the direction in which the works should be read. The gaze wanders from top to bottom. The works appear to have sunken in the ground, remaining connected to the surface, to the present by means of mysterious antennae. Submersed in time they seem to be engaged in an imaginary dialogue. The prostheses that appear to come from their inside also direct attention to their “internal life”. A further cavity with sediments, deposits, traces of a collective unconscious?

The objects remain suspended. The impression as a sign of recognition or even a sign of identity is subverted. For Anne Schneider a decisive factor is the artist becoming one with his/her material, the contact and the way the body relates to it. In his book “Similarity and Touch” Georges Didi-Huberman writes the following, quoting Gilbert Simondon: one would have to “be able to get at the form together with clay, becoming both form and clay. To be able to feel and experience their interaction, to be able to conceive of the emergence of form.” Anne Schneider’s forms can only be grasped by re-experiencing this contact.